Top Prison Official Abused Power To Aid Quayle, Senate Report

Says

October 03, 1992|By New York Times News Service.

WASHINGTON — A Senate report made public Friday accuses the nation`s senior prison official of punishing an inmate for political reasons on the eve of the 1988 presidential election, after the convict maintained that he had repeatedly sold marijuana to Dan Quayle many years earlier.

The report reopens an embarrassing episode for the Justice Department that has survived only through the persistence of the prisoner, Brett Kimberlin, 38.

Four days before the 1988 election, a news conference that local prison officials set up because they felt it was the easiest way for Kimberlin to respond to requests for interviews was canceled. Kimberlin was then taken from his cell and placed in a special detention cell used for punishing prisoners. Both the cancellation and the confinement were ordered by J. Michael Quinlan, the senior prison official in Washington. It is the only known instance in which a director of prisons issued an order to put a convict in special detention.

After a four-month investigation, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who is chairman of the Senate subcommittee on government management that issued the report, called on the Justice Department`s inspector general to investigate the incident. A spokesman for the Justice Department said the inspector general, Richard J. Hankinson, would conduct an independent review of the Senate report before deciding whether to take additional action.

There is no evidence that the vice president intervened, although court records show that he and other senior officials in the 1988 campaign were briefed about the affair as it unfolded. Nor has there been any reliable corroboration of Kimberlin`s assertion that he sold marijuana to Quayle while he was a law student in Indiana from the fall of 1971 through early 1973.